From Tomato Novel to TikTok: ByteDance’s Talent Strategy Behind Haifeng’s Resignation

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On June 3, multiple sources reported that Haifeng, Head of Product Strategy for ByteDance’s TikTok, has resigned.

As a veteran who served over seven years at ByteDance, Haifeng’s resume is a typical “elite template”: a background from Tsinghua University’s Department of Electronics, former roles as BCG consultant, Morgan Stanley Asia Fund and IDG Capital investor.

Within ByteDance, he was regarded as one of the most successful crossover executives transitioning from strategic investment to frontline product business.

Haifeng’s career path at ByteDance reflects a core talent logic used by Chinese internet giants during the era of traffic stock competition: letting investment-savvy professionals run businesses that are strongly ROI-driven.

When Haifeng first joined ByteDance, he worked in the Strategic Investment Department. As the industry shifted from territory expansion to refined operations, ByteDance’s strategic investment structure began to deeply bind with core business lines, and Haifeng moved towards product strategy. The most iconic battle in his career was participating in the building of the "Tomato Novel" business.

The core business model of Tomato Novel is “free reading + advertising monetization,” essentially a highly sophisticated model for traffic acquisition and commercial ROI transformation.

In this model, product strategy does not focus simply on UI function innovation, but emphasizes the extreme balance between content procurement cost, customer acquisition cost, and user lifetime value.

Haifeng’s VC background and rigorous data calculation skills found a precise place in this business driven by strong commercial logic. This ability to convert financial perspectives into business metrics paved the way for him to take on more complex global product strategy roles later.

The transfer to TikTok as Head of Product Strategy was Haifeng’s last core leap within the ByteDance system. At this point, TikTok had already evolved from a single short video community into a complex global commercial ecosystem intertwined with social, e-commerce, and local lifestyle sectors.

At this stage, TikTok’s product strategy faced structural challenges on two dimensions:

On one hand, there was internal resource competition among multiple business lines—under the backdrop of slowing user time growth, how to balance the purity of short video content with the commercial exposure of e-commerce sales? This is not just a question of traffic distribution on the product interface, but also a strategic decision directly related to user retention rates and GMV conversion rates.

On the other hand, there was a shift towards asset-heavy cycles and regional localization—TikTok, in its global expansion, was moving from lightweight app exports to asset-heavy local infrastructure.

For example, by the end of 2025, TikTok announced an investment over 200 billion Brazilian Real to build Latin America’s first data center in Brazil. Facing compliance pressures in mature markets, how to formulate differentiated product access strategies based on the computing infrastructure and commercialization stage of emerging markets is the core exam for the Head of Strategy.

From his functional positioning, Haifeng mainly focused on providing a top-level design framework for accelerating TikTok’s commercialization in different country markets through data-driven macro analysis.

Haifeng’s departure to a certain extent marks a phased shift occurring in the "cross-border frontline transformation for strategic-investment-type executives" dividend period within internet giants.

Looking back at the past few years, leading companies including ByteDance have assigned many executives with strategic investment backgrounds to core business lines. This model—“investors doing product”—was highly penetrating during the phases of resource integration and business model validation.

However, as overseas business moves into deep local compliance operations and new cycles where hardcore technologies like embodied intelligence reshape content production chains, the requirements for product strategy leaders inevitably tilt towards deep industry practical experience and an understanding of hard tech.

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